Deepening the mystery

Art versus ordinary life, round one.

Today's Art Quote of the Day from BrainyQuote.com was from Francis Bacon,
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."

Universal pronouncements about art are generally worthy of skepticism, but by
subscribing to Art Quote of the Day, I've basically agreed to suspend my
disbelief in that regard. Part of me likes to read people's "always" statements
about art, because what they usually do is show some aspect of art to be
appreciated. I just ignore the "always" part, and the overuse of definite
articles.

At least Mr. Bacon gives artists a job. We can always use one of those. But I
don't have any idea what "deepening the mystery" really means. I tend to like
art, especially writing, that does what's probably the opposite. I love the
poems of people like John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan, who involve
many very mundane details of pop culture and "ordinary" daily life. A friend
and I were talking yesterday about the way people talk, and the little phrases
we say to frame our conversations, like, "I love the theater, but I..." Art can
take these kinds of moments as its subject, or its form, or both, and I'm not
sure any mysteries would afterward be deeper than they already were.

A quick handy example from "A Step Away from Them" in Lunch Poems
by Frank O'Hara:

It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

This isn't the kind of poetry I hope to write, but it is a kind of poetry that
I value and want to be informed by. If there's an opposite to the idea that
poets should be preachers of morality and deepeners of mystery, this could be
it. This guy's just shopping for wristwatches and checking out the construction
workers.